On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:15:04 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Nathan Hamblen wrote:
As far as the site goes, it should set accesskeys that are the most useful to the most people, without too much regard for pre-release browsers on Linux with open accesskey bugs.
That would probably be very few access keys then. Do more than a handful of people actually use these access keys, and have any significant number of people requested them? I'd wager there's more Wikipedians who use Firefox on Linux than there are Wikipedians who use alt + . to visit their user page.
The major use case for accesskeys is to help with accessibility for the disabled. (They can be very helpful for users with screen readers and users with motor disabilities in particular.) For more information, cf. http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_15_defining_keyboard_shortcuts.html
It's also worth noting that accessibility concerns make including accesskeys simultaneously more important *and* more difficult, because they impose the extra concern of not colliding with keyboard shortcuts defined by the browsing software (and packages like the JAWS screen reader define quite a few). I was a bit alarmed to see that WikiPedia has been colonizing alphabetic shortcut keys for its shortcuts; the best thing to do to avoid collisions is to restrict accesskeys, insofar as possible, to numbers 0-9 (= ALT+0, ALT+1, ...). Dive Into Accessibility covers some of the common mappings that have been agreed on, and links to further discussions.
HTH.
-C